SL Go, by OnLive
Today just after 9am SLT, Linden Lab announced news of an exciting new service for Second Life users called SL Go which is now in open beta. The first ever Second Life mobile app runs on Android devices and soon it will be available for iOS devices. The app is available for UK, US and Canadian residents currently. New users sign up here.
OnLive, the leader in cloud gaming, today released an exciting new service for Second Life users. SL Go, now in open beta, is a mobile Second Life viewer for Android that delivers a fully immersive desktop-like experience on tablets.
With SL Go, you can experience Second Life from anywhere you have Wi-Fi or 4G connectivity, with ultra high-quality graphics, full shaders, shadows, and the Advanced Lightning Model on Android devices. Not only can you get high-quality graphics on a low-powered device, but you also don’t have to sacrifice frame rate or draw distance for high fidelity inworld explorations. Thanks to super-fast gigabit connections with OnLive’s high-performance gaming servers, objects and textures rez quickly when logging in and teleporting. OnLive has clocked the SL Go viewer at upwards of 200 fps set to Ultra with Maximum Render Distance, allowing people to participate in events, engage in combat games, and generally enjoy immersion in Second Life at a level never before possible on a mobile device.
With SL Go, OnLive has brought touchscreen interaction to the Second Life experience, but if you prefer keyboard and mouse, you can opt to connect these devices and interact with your friends in the same way you always have. SL Go gives you access to edit menus, inventory, preference settings and chat management just like the Second Life Viewer on your home computer.
See below for the official SL Go by OnLive homepage to sign up and to learn more about the new SL service.
Beta Testing
A few months ago Linden Lab selected a handful of SL users to help test and review SL Go app. I kindly accepted the offer and helped out with input during the past few months. I didn’t know anything about the pricing side until today. I can understand why everyone wants it to be free and I agree it should be. 🙂
Pricing
New SL Go app accounts get a free trial period of 20 minutes and after that time you will have to purchase for more time. The first 20 minutes will give you the chance to see what the SL Go app is all about. Experience Second Life in full 3D on tablet/mobile devices today.
- $3.00 for one hour
- $8.00 for three hours
- $25.00 for ten hours
New Videos
Introducing SL Go
Introducing SL Go (slgo.onlive.com), the best way to experience Second Life in full 3D on mobile devices. No expensive desktop computer needed—just connect and go on your tablet. Experience Second Life’s full visual performance when you’re away from your desktop. And thanks to OnLive’s state of the art data center, rez into your favorite sims faster than you ever thought possible. Sign up for a free trial at slgo.onlive.com.
Draxtor plays: SL GO [by OnLive] = Flufee builds…
Live Show
There will be a special Designing Worlds show in Second Life today at 2pm SLT with live coverage with guests which will be streamed on Aview. Teleport to the studio here (SLURL) and join in with the discussion about the new SL launched service.
Daniel Voyager 
This is hardly news: http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Second-Life-Viewer/Second-Life-Mobile-Beta-Fake-or-Real/td-p/2278617
Pep (Just confirmation)
PS $25 for 10 hours play? Yeah, right, give me $50 worth for the weekend . . .
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I really cant see people paying to use sl just to have it on their tablet or mobile phones. It is a very good app and its great to be able to actually have the full 3D experience on a tablet or mobile, but to pay hourly for SL, when you can just log on via a computer or laptop for free, is just insane. I can see paying for the app, before you download it, but not paying to use the app by the hour.
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I agree, pricing is a issue for sure.
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Thanks, Pep.
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1 Hour (Full Price) – $3.00 wow :p
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I know, the pricing is a big issue for many. Thanks, Betty.
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“The first ever Second Life mobile app”? Granted, Lumiya doesn’t provide anything close to the full SL experience, but I’ve used it for a couple of years now as an inexpensive way (read: no monthly, much less hourly, fees) to get inworld and tend to a few things that can’t wait ’til I’m at my computer.
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It’s the first official app one for SL linked with Linden Lab. Lumiya is very popular at the moment and I’ve been using it for the past few years. I’ve got no problems really with it.
Thanks, Shmoo.
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Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to evaluate SL GO. Of the free 20 minutes of tryout time, I have already spent 16 on merely connecting, logging in, being told my WiFi has fallen below minimum requirements (router for my Nexus 7 is all of 4′ away), and exiting. I would be willing to keep trying, but I’m certainly not going to pay for the opportunity to do so.
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It is possible to use Splashtop to access Second Life on your Android tablet (through your PC) over your home wi-fi with next to no lag for free. I’ve not tried the pay service ($1.99 per month) to connect remotely, but I might have to try it now.
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Thanks, Moxie. I’ve not heard or used Splashtop before. Hmm…
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Something tells me whoever did the pricing on this has absolutely no idea what sort of demand there is for this product. SL can barely handle the raging demand as it is with just normal PC clients and the inexpensive Lumiya for android. I’m sure that is why SL’s concurrency hasn’t really changed in the past 6 years. I’d happily pay $20/hr to access the normally free SecondLife through a much less versatile interface.
Also, who needs 20 minutes to decide whether the app is good or not? More than 2 minutes is just a wasteful loss of profits for OnLive.
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Thanks, Mel. I agree pricing is very expensive for the hourly rate. SL’s concurrency has been in decline the past 3 years and it used to be in the high 80, 000’s back in 2009. I don’t want to pay to access Second Life because I like it when things are free.
20 minutes is not enough time and it should be use it for 7 days or 30 days then pay for it.
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At first look I thought “great”. At 2nd look I noticed “Android only for now”. At 3rd look I noticed “not in Germany for now”. But 2 and 3 don’t matter anymore anyways, I will not pay 3 (or in the best case 2.50) Dollar per hour! And I think that this will be the same for most people. If it was $3 per month, maybe. Or it would be a nice incentive if included in the premium membership fee.
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Thanks, Daniel. I like that Second Life is now in the mobile market but pricing it seems to be crazy I think. It’s like charging people to use Second Life on the main viewer it won’t work with the community on the grid.
Perhaps a one off fee would be better.
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Sorry to hear you wasted your time testing this Daniel, but on a PAYG structure, at those utterly unrealistic prices, there aren’t going to be more than a handful of people using this.
Once again it shows just how out of touch Linden Labs are with their user base (and in this case the rest of the world too). That level of pricing isn’t inline with SLs economy, and it isn’t inline with the current global economy either. Can you imagine if Activision started charging $25 a day to play Call Of Duty, or Google charging per search term? The ideas sound laughable, but this is exactly what LL have done, and in the long list of spectacularly stupid decisions they have made, this one wears the number one crown – a potentially fantastic and game changing technology, that could have put SL back in the public eye, assigned to obscurity by greed.
I suspect many Lindens read this Blog, so this is a message direct to you. At the moment you can be greedy, ignore your user base, impose draconian rules, and slack on innovation. You can do this because you are still riding the wave created by Phillip in 2003, and currently SL still has no truly viable competitors. However after nearly 11 years, SL hasn’t really moved on at all, and it won’t be long before a competitor does emerge, with all the enthusiasm you guys had back then. At that point your user base is likely to show you the kind of loyalty you have been dishing out all these years, and SL will be as empty as a newly created prim. It’s not to late to prevent this, and maybe a good place to start would be to redress the mess of a pricing structure for SL Go.
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Thanks, Actingill.
I enjoyed beta testing it for the past few months and it was free to use Second Life via using OnLive. For some reason they decided to add pricing which I don’t like very much at all.
Pricing either needs to change or be dropped in the coming months.
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I totally agree, although with OnLive providing the tech, it’s very unlikely to be free. What I find insulting however, is that an OnLive subscription to play their other games is $14.99 per month, i.e. what LL is charging for just 5 hours of SL Go access. So I guess if OnLive can provide the service at $14.99 for 30 days access, the other $1785.01 (cost of 30 days access under the current plan) is just pure Linden Lab profit.
What I love most of all is the marketing… ‘Why buy an expensive PC for $1000, and access SL for free over its 3 year expected lifetime, when you can simply pay Linden Lab $64,800 over the same time period, and get a vastly reduced feature set’.
Let’s hope when Ebbe gets settled in, he finds out the parties responsible for this ridiculous and limiting price plan and relieves them of their salary.
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So, Eb’s answer to LL/SL’s many, many, many, self-inflicted wounds is to promote a browser that is priced so high that no more than a handful of people will use it and to open up the JIRA again. Wow!! What a way to not hit the ground running… Everyone knows LL/SL’s major problem is tier pricing, grandfathered regions, and the Atlas program(landbarons and selected others get major discounts on tier – double digit discounts which never go away). Discounts on setup fees is one thing for someone buying a bunch of regions. I could see that. But permanent discounts on tier to a few selected region owners is crony capitalism and most SL landowners know it. That’s why over time as folks wise up to the rigged economic game that is SL, the number of region owner grows smaller with more and more control given over to the top landowners(landbarons). This is and has been the major problem within LL/SL and the uppity ups refuse to acknowledge it or even to discuss it. Major Fail! And this is why “new boss same as the old boss”.
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Thanks, cathartes.
The lab and OnLive needs to look at the pricing plans. Listen to what people want and make changes to improve the SL Go app. Again it’s in beta so perhaps things will change before the public release if it gets to that stage.
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Well why not take the whole grid into the cloud that’s were it needs to be.
Regions should also be in the cloud. then offline if not in use that could save a ton of money.
It would not be hard they already have server side baking.
Land Tier will never be lowered. that in itself will be the cancer that kills second life.
this app is just the painkiller for those of us with our lives terminal here. a sadist tease to others of what might have been. the fetish is reality
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Thanks, for the comment Milkshake.
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This is actually a double-whammy compounded scam deal…
– If you use this tool, you also get LL’s predatory August 2013 Terms of Service 2.3 with Vendor Lock-in + Intellectual Property Piracy.
New World Note writes http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2013/11/uccsl-tos.html#more
– The JIRA agreement terms goes a step further with predatory Patent terms…
http://wiki.secondlife.com/w/index.php?title=Linden_Lab_Official:Contribution_Agreement
You pay a double-whammy to get your content + ideas ripped off in the final!
This offering also violates EU Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000
Information to be communicated before contract formation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Protection_(Distance_Selling)_Regulations_2000
Sellers: If you want to be compliant with eCommerce + Consumer Protection regulations in 28 countries use:
Online Shopping Assistant from eConsumer.gov
http://www.econsumer.gov/english/resources/shopping-assistant-text.shtm
Customers: Report your International Complaint in 28 countries here
http://www.econsumer.gov/english/report/overview.shtm
and International Blacklisting with
– Scam Alerts here
http://icpen.org/for-consumers/scam-alerts
It is a Buyer’s market, not a Seller’s market!
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SL on the cloud means no way to explore like we can do now, using a boat, a plane or whatever, for that We have already kitely, and it would kill the main purpose of mainland!
Who wanted to wait 1 minute or more to travel from a region on the blake sea or on bay city, for example, walking, on bike, by plane , by boat by …..
Is some Sl still has advantage is on the vast mass of regions connected and the tech that allows any to travel between them without the use of teleport!
What you purpose by going cloud will kill that!
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